May 2001 University Reporter

Chancellor Gora By Jeffrey Mitchell

“I’m walking around the campus and talking to people,” says Jo Ann Gora, UMass Boston’s new chancellor. “I want to learn my way around the campus and around the community. I want to be responsive to the concerns that are expressed.”

During her first weeks at the university, Gora plans to focus on understanding the community. She’s meeting faculty members, students, and staff on campus, and she’s also getting acquainted with political, governmental, and business leaders throughout greater Boston. She talks with them about whatever issues they choose to raise, but she also asks everyone she visits the same three questions: What is the biggest problem UMass Boston should address? What are UMass Boston’s greatest strengths? What does it mean to be a national model for public, urban universities?

When Gora met with a group of student leaders and asked them about UMass Boston’s greatest strengths, Undergraduate Student Senate President Heather Dawood gave a one-word answer: “Faculty.” Dawood went on to name several faculty members whose classes she would “crawl through the snow on her knees” to attend.

Gora plans to tell more such stories, and to tell them far and wide. “My goal is to increase the pride and visibility of UMass Boston,” she says. “People need to know about the excellence here, and why they should support this institution.” She speaks of the “rigorous education we provide, the strong faculty who care about their students, the remarkable students who have done interesting things with their lives and have a real sense of focus about their future.” These should be sources of pride, and so should the university’s institutes and centers, whose research and policy work has such widespread impact and such importance, ultimately, for people’s daily lives. Similarly important are numerous community outreach efforts, among them the university’s pre-college programs and off-campus continuing education classes.

When she asks about issues UMass Boston should address, Gora encounters “overwhelming concern” about the physical condition of the campus. “Though much has been done,” to improve this, she says, “much still needs to be done.” Her concern extends to the quality of the learning environment as a whole, particularly the infrastructure that supports new forms of teaching and information exchange. She sees instructional technology as a “tool” that can “enable students to learn more and better, to be more responsible about learning,” and she wants to be sure that UMass Boston’s faculty has the full use of this resource.

Academic complexities are nothing new to Gora—before she began work at UMass Boston on August 1, she served as provost at Old Dominion University, and before that as a dean, associate dean, and member of the Sociology Department at Fairleigh Dickinson. When she was a young, newly tenured professor, she remembers, a dean approached her to draw her into administrative work; and when she asked, “Why me?” he answered, “Because you like to solve problems.”

“That’s what administrators do,” says Gora. “They identify problems, they define problems, and then—hopefully—they solve them.” And she adds that administrators “need to see themselves as people who are facilitating the growth of an institution, helping it to realize its potential.”

She’s determined to solve problems at UMass Boston—for example, the problems of attracting financial support from beyond the university and of doing more with current resources. She’s

determined to help UMass Boston realize its potential by strengthening the connection between students and faculty members. “An institution’s reputation is built on its faculty and students,” she says. “That’s how the world knows us—because of the work of our faculty, and the work of our alums. Our job is to enhance that relationship and take away all the impediments that get in its way.”

And she’s determined to get the word out. “We need to tell people who we are,” says Chancellor Gora, “and why they should be proud of UMass Boston.”

Chancellor Gora Gets Down to Work